Interview with FB Society CEO Jack Gibbons about the relationship between profit and expansion, scaling multi-million dollar restaurants, and embracing confrontation.
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00:00 Welcome to Restaurant Influencers. My name is Sean Walsh, founder of Cali BBQ
00:05 and Cali BBQ Media. In life, in the restaurant business, and in the new
00:09 creator economy, we learn through lessons and stories. I want to give a special
00:13 shout out to Toast, our primary technology partner at our barbecue
00:17 restaurants here in San Diego, but more importantly for believing in this show,
00:21 for giving us the opportunity to work with entrepreneur to share stories of
00:25 the greatest storytellers and the greatest hospitality minds on the planet. Today we
00:30 have Jack Gibbons, CEO of Front Burner Society. Jack is a legend in the space
00:36 and we are honored to have Jack on the show. Jack, welcome. Thank you, Sean. Thank
00:41 you so much for being here. We're gonna kick us off with our favorite
00:45 random question, which is where in the world is your favorite stadium, stage, or
00:50 venue? Oh wow, okay. I'd say my favorite concert that was in a really cool venue
00:59 was at the Belly Up in Aspen, Colorado. Train was playing and it was super
01:05 intimate and it was really cool and it's a great performance and I think the
01:10 venue made the experience, you know, for sure. That's awesome. We're gonna go to
01:15 the Belly Up in Aspen. No guest has picked the Belly Up in Aspen, so we're a
01:20 big fan of intimate venues and I'm gonna put you, I'm gonna talk to entrepreneur,
01:25 talk to Toast, talk to some other partners, and we're gonna do kind of a
01:28 TEDx style hospitality conference where I just want Jack to get on the mic. I
01:34 don't want any panels, I don't want any, none of the stuff that we see
01:38 out there. I know there's some places that are doing better, but I
01:42 want to hear, I want to hear Jack just take the mic and tell me, Jack, who are
01:46 you and what do you believe? So my name is Jack Gibbons. I consider myself a
01:53 restaurateur, but I'm only as good as the people that, you know, work around me on
01:59 my team. We have an amazing team and the name of our company is FB Society. We
02:04 create brands, you know, you know, and really to create brands that, you know,
02:12 have, you know, never been imagined and interesting and it's an
02:16 experiential company and that's kind of what we do. Can you give us an idea of
02:20 the size and scope of the work that you've done? Yeah, so we've created over
02:25 20 brands that have actually opened up as restaurants in the last 15 years. Some
02:32 of the brands have scaled and continue to scale as we've exited those brands,
02:37 some of them being Twin Peaks, which is over a hundred and something restaurants
02:41 now. Velvet Taco is probably well over 50 now. Those are brands that we're not
02:47 engaged with day to day. Velvet Taco we're still investors in, but then we
02:53 have multiple brands. Primarily we start them all in Dallas and then when it
02:59 makes sense we scale them outside, hopefully regionally first and
03:03 nationally. Can you tell us a story of when you knew Randy DeWitt was the guy? Yeah,
03:10 oh yeah. Randy, my partner, and I had known each other for a couple years. He
03:17 always says he was trying to hire me away from Pappas at the time I was
03:20 running Pappadoke and he had a seafood business called Rockfish that originally
03:28 he had sold in a partnership to Brinker and had bought back and it was kind of
03:34 struggling and he was kind of looking for the next thing to do in his life and
03:39 we talked often about him trying to hire me to run Rockfish and at the time
03:45 running Pappadoke was a far more exciting opportunity and what he really
03:52 started to educate me and as a bit of a mentor to just being an entrepreneur and
03:57 Randy's an entrepreneur in the truest sense and he really taught me the
04:01 difference between being a person who could eventually become a
04:06 CEO and a person who could really be an owner of a business and an entrepreneur
04:10 and dream up new businesses and that's really how Randy made a huge
04:16 impression on me and lured me away from a great organization like Pappas to come
04:20 and take a chance on a really small opportunity that turned into something
04:26 really exciting. Do you remember that first dream, that first concept? I do. It
04:34 was actually, if you're familiar with Austin, it was the first opportunity was
04:39 on Lake Austin and it's a beautiful part of Texas. It's one of the coolest parts
04:44 of Texas and ironically I ended up buying a home on Lake Austin so it kind
04:50 of the story came full circle but it was a wild dream of opening a
04:58 restaurant on Lake Austin. It was going to be a seafood restaurant. It was a
05:02 really cool location on the water where boats would pull up and as we were
05:07 going through the process and getting to know each other because we still
05:10 weren't actually on the same team yet, I think he really impressed me
05:15 with his deal-making and how that was going and then I think I really
05:20 impressed him with just my creativity and operations and how I would really
05:23 use the space and the deal fell through but through that process it really
05:29 cemented in my mind that I could work with this guy and I think he was kind of
05:34 special. What was the first deal that did go through? It was to kind of
05:42 work for front burner but the real first deal was a brand called
05:50 The Ranch at Las Colinas and it was a Bahama breeze that was closed down that
05:55 in 2008 before the economy really crashed it was not doing well but which
06:00 I picked my timing great of course but in 2008 this Bahama breeze closed and we
06:09 bought it for two million dollars the real estate and then ultimately we were
06:15 like what would work here in Las Colinas which is a western suburb of
06:20 Dallas that could really be special and it's a kind of a business community and
06:27 what we saw was a lot of the people that lived in that community or worked in
06:31 that community were entertaining people because when people come to Texas they're
06:36 like we want to try something Texas right so and they were driving all the
06:40 way to Fort Worth so we just kind of saw this blue sky in the market to
06:45 say why don't we try to create something Texas and really Texas centric and not
06:50 not kind of like the old Texas where it's like Yahoo and they cut your tie
06:54 off and they do stupid shit like that but something where you know you
06:58 actually get great whiskeys and bourbons you can try local you know cuisine you
07:04 could try locally farm products and and that's really kind of where we started
07:09 it at The Ranch in Las Colinas and coming full circle on that we just are
07:14 hitting our 15th year will be close to 15 million in revenue after 15 years
07:22 all-time record for sales and and it's it's been that story ever since we
07:28 opened and so you know that that's a magical restaurant for us and really
07:33 kind of kicked off a lot of the other brands that we have today. When you think
07:38 about scaling restaurant concepts how do what kind of lens do you look at it?
07:43 Like I think first off you know contrary to a lot of other people would say as I
07:51 say profit is not a four-letter word like if you don't build margin into your
07:56 brand you can't hire the best people you can't buy the best products you can't
08:03 run great campaigns and it gives you zero flexibility and so I think that
08:09 when you design a brand and you look at national expansion or even regional
08:13 expansion it needs to a concept needs to earn the right to grow and just because
08:19 you open a restaurant doesn't mean you should grow it contrary to a lot of
08:23 people think and you know then you hear crazy people talking about franchising
08:27 and all this stuff and like the first thing is you just got to run one great
08:31 restaurant and it's got to make sense financially it's got to start developing
08:36 a culture you know it's got to really kind of like create a personality
08:40 attract people so there's a series of things that need to happen. Do you have
08:45 any stories you can share with us about any concept that didn't make it? Yeah oh
08:50 yeah we had a restaurant called the keeper and I don't know if they'd... The
08:57 keeper ironic huh? Yeah and and there's irony in the name because a lot of
09:04 people didn't exactly know what that meant but it was actually a seafood
09:07 restaurant so and it was it was beautiful restaurant beautiful build
09:13 out it had the right you know food it just but it the through that process and
09:20 then through COVID just didn't have the economics and it wasn't working strong
09:25 enough to say this is a brand that we're going to scale so during COVID when the
09:30 opportunity came up to get out of the lease it just was one of those ones that
09:35 said hey let's double down on some other things because this is taking up just as
09:39 much energy but like long term it doesn't really have the same ability to
09:44 grow. How do you review how do you view recruiting to build a team on the on the
09:51 on the corporate side of the business? So we have a saying around front burner
09:57 that is only hire people smarter than you so if I'm not hiring people smarter
10:03 than me in all the disciplines like finance in operations in construction
10:09 and development on our real estate side then we're not going to do it all that
10:14 well so I think that really when I think of who I want in the room with me is
10:20 people way smarter than me and so I think that's part of our success is we
10:25 just really go after the the highest level of talent and again it all it all
10:30 kind of goes back to why profit isn't a four-letter word because if you don't
10:35 have the margins you can't afford those people to be in the room and so I think
10:39 that that that's a key thing is I think entrepreneurs that don't hire people
10:44 smarter than are stymieing their own growth. Who's the smartest person you've
10:49 recently hired? Hmm my CFO he's brilliant his name is Brad Leist super talented
10:57 way smarter than me when it comes to finance and the work that he's done in a
11:02 very short period of time in our organization it's just smart it makes me
11:08 look smart. When you look in what gets you excited for 2024 what are you what
11:14 are you currently working on? So new brands is usually what what gets us
11:19 excited and also that when when our brands that we've kind of growed them
11:23 grown them out we're not done growing and we we are still developing those
11:31 brands as they grow. One that the brand that I had mentioned about the ranch at
11:36 Las Colinas when when we had a location in 2017 to actually build a second one
11:42 which we never thought we'd do the idea of naming it the ranch in Plano was
11:48 about the stupidest name I had ever heard in my life right and and it was an
11:52 early part of our career that we named it the ranch at Las Colinas which
11:56 actually started as the Cadillac ranch until we got sued by Tillman for TIA
12:01 because no yeah he had a trademark on the name Cadillac in conjunction with
12:08 any restaurant so but in the lawsuit in the early days it was great because like
12:16 well if we if you pay for the sign we'll change the name and which the lawyers
12:22 of this company agreed to so that's how really and it was the cheapest way to do
12:26 it on the sign was to call it the ranch Las Colinas so so when it actually came
12:32 time to grow that brand we're like okay that that name is a terrible name to
12:36 grow with so that's how we ended up coming up with the name Haywire which I
12:42 love the name because it can mean so many different things it just sort of
12:46 implies a certain level of craziness a certain level of like a lot of shit
12:51 going on and so as we designed this second Haywire you know it has three
12:59 floors on the first floor it's kind of a whiskey bar which in Texas is just part
13:04 of a way of life if you don't have you know happy hour in a whiskey bar which
13:07 is where I call it my second office so and then on the second floor we designed
13:14 it that you actually walk through the kitchen to get into the dining room
13:17 which is amazing because on the left side of the kitchen you got all the
13:21 fresh baking going on for breads and desserts and on the right side of the
13:25 kitchen it's got a peekaboo window as you approach it to kind of see cooks and
13:30 action and then you walk by a display case of beautiful Texas meats which are
13:35 heavily marbled and you just see a lot of action and then you get kind of get
13:39 into your seating area and then of course it wouldn't be Texas if we
13:44 didn't have a bar on every floor so then we have a third floor rooftop deck that
13:49 we have an Airstream trailer we have some tents that were inspired from
13:54 Martha Texas if you've ever been to Martha it is a place that you you know
13:59 you you rent a tents to live in and or stay in so and it takes all those
14:05 experiences and just makes them into this crazy sort of contemporary Texas
14:10 experience and and so it's super fun. When you think of the DNA of a brand
14:16 from concept and development execution to opening the restaurant then to
14:22 building a legacy for that restaurant how do you go about that life cycle?
14:28 Well first off you know DNA for me means differentiation nuances and attitudes
14:35 right so differentiation is certainly part of the brand creation we're not
14:40 copycats I don't want to do something that somebody else has done of course
14:45 I'm always looking for inspiration but I feel like you know we always want to
14:49 find our own unique you know elements about it and then nuances I think the
14:57 consumer today is not looking for just another show up and treat food and a
15:03 restaurant like a commodity they're constantly they like I think the more
15:07 nuances you can build into a brand the stronger it's going to be because it
15:11 just creates that it reinforces the first element of the D the differentiation and
15:17 just makes it more unique and special to their experience and then the attitude I
15:22 mean whether it's in the culinary side or the experiential side it's got to be
15:27 something that just really kind of what why should it exist because the last
15:30 thing the world needs is just another restaurant so I think that if you're
15:34 birthing something it should be really special and you treat it special and
15:39 then when you think about scaling I think not enough people actually take
15:44 all those ideas and actually put it into paper I think what we do is we actually
15:50 commit before we ever actually sign a lease we actually create a DNA that's
15:55 actually written down on paper and it's really the reason a brand should exist
15:59 and and when you put a lot of thought into the front end of your business all
16:06 of a sudden at some point I'm gonna hire someone to run that business for me I'm
16:11 gonna bring them in I'm gonna bring additional people we're gonna have
16:14 additional units and as you scale a lot of brands lose their soul they lose
16:21 their specialness they lose that you know sort of you know that that DNA and
16:27 so what we really do is we share the DNA with the team we make it a big part of
16:34 the training we make it part of something you celebrate all the time and
16:37 we also not only for the the staff but for the management team because really
16:41 decisions should be made around the DNA if you're a Texas concept and you try to
16:46 bring in Miller Lite on tap like that's just a total mistake it's incongruent
16:52 with the DNA and so if you're a Texas brand and you try to bring in salmon you
16:57 know we don't have salmon here you know you know it'd be like hey what are we
17:02 thinking you know so you know as the team's working and they're really
17:06 thinking about the brand it really is kind of like the Constitution for a
17:10 brand and keeps people on track and keeps it moving forward and really you
17:15 know keeps it feeling right as opposed to just being random people coming in
17:19 and making decisions which often happens to restaurants and quality suffers the
17:24 brand itself doesn't become as clear to the consumer and it just creates a lot
17:29 of problems how do you view your vendor partners the primary ones that you
17:35 choose to do business with across multiple concepts I mean I mean a lot of
17:41 times one thing we do is we do this celebration of our vendors in particular
17:49 are the farmers right we invite them every year to show up their wares and
17:54 kind of like a happy hour to customers and then afterwards we actually have
17:58 them go into one of our private rooms and our team actually feeds them a
18:03 sit-down dinner and and the idea of doing that is a one to say thank you and
18:08 be to let them just kind of relax one night with their family and enjoy a
18:12 sit-down meal themselves because you know the vendors are often I I run into
18:17 more like them hustling food into the restaurant because they're short or we're
18:21 really busy or something's going on and you know so you know that's that's kind
18:27 of how we feel about our vendors you've self described yourself as a maverick
18:36 within your own organization do you believe that every successful
18:41 organization needs to have some sort of maverick I think to a certain degree you
18:47 have to be you have to be comfortable with confrontation I think that and that
18:54 not saying that again if it's confrontation and I'm not the smartest
18:58 guy in the room that's always kind of interesting right so I think that you
19:04 need to challenge the norms and challenge ideas and challenge the
19:08 thinking and challenge you know things if things aren't challenged they're
19:13 gonna get boring and you know things are gonna kind of hit a point that you just
19:18 become vanilla and I I just think that if you're an experiential company that
19:23 creates brands the one thing you don't want to ever be is vanilla confront is a
19:29 great word it's Jerry Seinfeld the comedian's favorite word and it's
19:33 something that I out of all these interviews I've done I haven't heard a
19:36 leader talk about confrontation in hospitality because it's almost the
19:41 antithesis to what we do in the hospitality space can you talk a little
19:45 bit more about confrontation because I think it is there's a thread there that
19:50 I think probably sets you guys apart from from most most brands yeah you know
19:56 having lots of restauranteur friends a good example of confrontation in a is
20:01 interesting is like how how our industry feels about Yelp like a hate Yelp you
20:07 know because you have these customers that are actually giving you
20:10 unsolicited feedback and you know and we totally think about it the opposite way
20:16 for me it's like man I love this feedback and I I could like just ignore
20:21 it if I choose to or I can act upon it or I could say wow that guy's really
20:26 thinking to put it in words of what I meant to say and so you know I I think
20:31 that that kind of challenge is so necessary to management teams and so we
20:38 put things like that right in front of the team and just we we actually
20:42 publicly respond to every Yelp as a company because I think if you truly
20:47 value your customers but you say only when it's something that's positive you
20:51 know that then that's a bunch of bullshit because the reality of it is we
20:54 don't execute perfectly every day and the only way you get better is to really
20:59 put the challenges in front of the team and ask them to say hey can we do a
21:03 better job than this so I think the idea of you know having people who can take
21:09 feedback and think about how we're going to be better it's the only way of how a
21:13 brand or a company progresses to ultimately what it can be because we've
21:18 all seen it when everybody feels like they're you know afraid to tell somebody
21:23 something and that's just like the definition of bad management. Yeah you
21:28 said that you have restaurateur friends and that comes with being in the
21:32 industry as long as you have have is there anything you proactively do to
21:36 stay involved to stay on top to stay connected to leaders that you respect
21:42 and admire that might be and maybe they're not just in the restaurant
21:45 space other entrepreneurs and different business verticals. Yeah I actually had
21:49 an amazing week two weeks ago I went from I won Southwestern United States EY
21:56 Entrepreneur of the Year so I traveled to Palm Springs to spend a couple days
22:02 with you know a big celebration of EY a big event that they had with great you
22:09 know all entrepreneurs from every discipline all over the United States
22:13 and you had a great lineup of speakers and then from there I flew to London
22:20 where with the Peach Conference I was the keynote speaker for 350 restaurant
22:26 executives and out of all of the UK and man I had that was the best
22:31 restaurateurs in the UK and so super cool brands really interesting people
22:36 and then from there I spent four days in Dubai visiting restaurants seeking some
22:43 inspiration for some new projects I'm working on and just thinking about what
22:47 the future of our company is and and then circling back back to Dallas so
22:53 that's that's that's what that's what I love to do and do those kind of
22:57 experiences to keep me in touch and sometimes when I do those trips I do it
23:01 with a series of different CEOs in the industry that we all just go look to you
23:06 know see some interesting things and enjoy some great food and cocktails and
23:10 company and tell some great stories and share some big ideas and you never know
23:15 what comes out of that. What was the keynote in the UK about? You know it was
23:21 really about how to operationalize ideas and you know how to turn those those
23:27 ultimately into you know things that can change people's lives you know so I
23:33 think ultimately that's that's what inspires me today. And doing that trip
23:39 what takeaways did you have for what you're building into the future? You know
23:45 I think the big takeaway is you know just that we're far from done there's a
23:51 lot more to learn and you know you know we're we're not getting any younger but
23:56 there's so much more to learn and so much more to share and I think that you
24:01 know when you look at it in a way that you know it's a bit of a journey and
24:05 everybody's journey is unique and special and you know I just feel like
24:08 you know my personal journey and the journey of our organization is really
24:12 you know we've done a bunch of with done a bunch of restaurants some
24:16 transactions we've had things happen over the years but we're still pretty
24:20 young company and still learning and growing. What do you think when you're
24:24 speaking to the other entrepreneurs what do you think entrepreneurs in different
24:28 industries can learn from our hospitality industry? I think you know
24:35 the rest of the the world doesn't see restauranteurs as entrepreneurs and and
24:41 I think that's was a lot of my message in in London was that you guys are the
24:46 ultimate entrepreneurs it's it's really to a certain degree when you study
24:49 history we are the people who started entrepreneurism and you have people who
24:56 are getting all the credit like tech people and other other disciplines that
25:01 might look sexier but it's funny they they have all the protection of you know
25:06 the government with trademarks and things like that that we don't have and
25:10 we actually have to scrap it out and fight for it and you know I don't think
25:16 the industry gets enough credit for what it really takes to be successful and and
25:21 and how truly entrepreneur it really is. Well I can't thank you Jack enough for
25:26 your time anybody that's following the show we appreciate you for watching we
25:31 appreciate you for listening please go see what F&B Society is doing all the
25:37 different concepts they have follow Jack on LinkedIn I will put links into the
25:41 show notes but is there any parting words of wisdom that you'd like to for
25:46 the restauranteur that's listening to this maybe on their way to their their
25:50 restaurant something that you'd like to to let them know? Yeah you know it's it's
25:56 funny you know this word is traditionally not used with entrepreneurs
26:01 but you know to love something in French is actually means amateur and an amateur
26:09 is actually what a real entrepreneur is because you go into it if you feel like
26:14 you've got all the answers and you know everything that you're really you're
26:18 never gonna fit on our team and you're never gonna be all that successful but
26:22 if you really can say I'm still I've been doing it for years but I'm still
26:26 a bit of an amateur I'm still learning I'm still growing ultimately that's
26:30 that's where it's at and I think that if you can you know continue to build that
26:34 mindset of you're you're always learning new things and you're always in and
26:38 there's so many disciplines to being a restauranteur whether it be through
26:42 finance, development, construction, you know accounting there's just so much to
26:49 learn that you are an amateur and it's okay and that's why you surround
26:53 yourself with better teams and better people and just try to keep learning.
26:56 It's amazing if you guys want to connect with me it's at Sean P Waltschaff
27:01 S H A W N P W A L C H E F that's on all the social platforms. Instagram is
27:08 probably the quickest way or LinkedIn but we appreciate you guys listening to
27:12 the show and as always like my grandfather taught me stay curious get
27:16 involved and don't be afraid to ask for help. We will catch you guys all next
27:20 week. Jack thank you so much for your time. Thanks Sean take care buddy.
27:24 Just a reminder you the listener you the viewer are the most important person
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